Arcade game chair

[Chuck Cage] and friends have been building a variety of arcade racing platforms. The third version, pictured above, has a real racing seat and can support a 32″ television. They’ve got advice for navigating the local “you-pull-it” when buying seats. There are material and paint selection tips on the site as well along with pictures of their three different versions.

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18 thoughts on “Arcade game chair”

awsome, it would be realllyyyy cool if they could add a little hydrolic or air powered thing that could tilt the whole frame and shake it, example (turning reallyyy fast, bumps, crashing) but well assume they dont crash. A working seat belt would be cool too.

If you are interested in building a driving cockpit I would suggest making a visit to the build your own section of the Race Sim Central Forums…http://forum.racesimcentral.com/forumdisplay.php?f=186
There is no more complete place on the web. They have everything from cockpit blueprints to, get this… custom Force Feedback shifters (using FF joysticks) not to mention some very involved custom motion platforms. There is truly no better place on the web for DIY driving game hardware.
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Gizmodo also has this article today as well (http://us.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home-entertainment/diy-gaming-chair-144924.php) but since I am not cool enough to be invited I cannot post. Not that I want to spam with crosslinking bs.. I just really love driving games and know that anyone who will be interested in this article will end up spending a lot of time finding much more great information and like-minded people.
torbo

Am I the only one or does the seating position look very uncomfortable? That guys knees are right next to his hands. It would seem that either the seat needs to come up like in a GT or Rally car or the pedals need to move further under the screen like in a Formula One car…
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Here’s a bad a55 motion platform fo you guys…http://www.frex.com/gp/motion/motionpage1.htm

If the cockpit is completely enclosed, when you turn left the _LEFT_ side would lift, making you lean to the right, just as you would in a left turn. Actually, that’s how it would work whether it’s enclosed or not, but simulated roll is disconcerting when you can see things outside the cockpit.

I made a quick-n-easy steering wheel rig for my PS2 from wood in one afternoon. It uses an existing couch/chair for the seat, and slides under the couch/chair when not in use, so that my wife doesn’t shout at me for blocking the room with large pieces of crap.

Oh and it works great.

Might even be good enough to submit to hackaday. No wait, maybe I should sell the plans for like $25 to whichever suckers are too lazy to design their own or copy mine… :P

Hey guys, thanks for the kind words. Sean and I built the one(s) in the article. A few responses:

— re: seating position —
Yes, the seating position is a little off. We’ve decided to extend the wheel slightly and move the pedals back a good bit. But we’ve been having fun playing with it, and haven’t dragged it back to the shop yet.

— re: hydraulics/motion —
We thought about messing around with this, but rejected it for two reasons: First, there’s no way to connect effectively to the game to have the motion actually make sense. Most of the ones we saw just rolled the chair left and right. Anyone who’s driven a race car (or a modified street car, for that matter) knows that there really isn’t a lot of body roll. That kind of motion didn’t really add to the game in our opinion, but to each his own. (Seriously! The whole concept of building your own is to make it for YOU, right?) Now if there were a way to have it feed bumps and the like… nice.

— re: other ideas —

Some ideas we thought would be cool, but got too lazy to pursue since we have a couple of game chairs to play and are having a good time with them:

1) Powered seats. We came across a ton of them at the junk yard. It’d be really easy to add a wall-powered 12v PS to power it.

2) Sound. We were going to build a 5.1 system into this seat, but just decided we wanted it done so we could move on to something new. A subwoofer mount would be nice, and it’d be pretty easy to add a bass shaker under the seat.

Anyway, hope you guys have fun building yours. Even the really simple ones make driving games a hell of a lot more fun.

It would be neat to make it into a gas powered go-kart. Put some wheels on it, connect the steering to a real steering shaft, the brakes real brakes, the gas to a real gas pedal. Put a small generator on it for the TV, then take the whole thing out to a big flat field and play the game to drive it around.

I built one of these seats, and have the chair supported on springs and a powerful motor with and unbalanced weight mounted on a steel frame underneath. I’m trying to get controller feedback to set off relays so you can simulate crashes and stuff. But the steering wheel feedback is different, and overrides the controller…. anyone know how I can hack it to get both???? Abutterworth34@hotmail.com